sexta-feira, 25 de março de 2016

WALKING IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION

All
the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their
possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had.

Acts
4:32

The
"paradises" that were painted of the past have more to do with dreams
than with reality. The people of Israel never came to realize the ideal of
living together in harmony as sisters and brothers. Internal conflicts have
always been the rule and unity only an unattained dream. The church from the
beginning was marked by mutual anathemas and heretic hunters. The episode of
Acts 4:32-35, if true, was a short lived exception and was never repeated
throughout its history. The good example of Barnabas brought on the hypocrisy
of Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1-11). Personal ambition has always been
present and often dominant in church history. Dreamers have been left with
nothing but dreams.

Our cultural values instill in us the ME FIRST principal in opposition to the ALL OF US principal. It is difficult for
us to feel deep down in our soul that our wellbeing is linked to that of all
others. We somehow believe that what happens to others has little to do with
us. With this mentality we ignore the uniqueness of the Gospel message that
Jesus lived and taught. Our Christianity is more about theories about the
person of Jesus and theological creeds and doctrines than about how to live the
Kingdom of God here and now. We find ourselves ignoring and living in
opposition to the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus set up as a model.

The words of the Sermon on the Mount, "Seek first
His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added" (Mt.
6:33) put the kingdom and righteousness above all things. Here Jesus was
speaking of the KINGDOM as being an alternative to insecurity. Western
“civilization” has gotten so sucked up on the issue of security and
self-protection that Christianity has abandoned the Kingdom and adopted the pure
pagan values of physical force and coercion as priority.

Glancing at a few items of the Sermon on the Mount here
are a few comments.

·Blessed are the peacemakers: Our
heroes are those whom we send heavily armed all over the globe to kill those whose
only offence is to defend themselves, rather than those who go unarmed in the
name of peace.

·Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth: We
approve of the retaliation of evil with evil and call it justice.

·Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you: We deal
with those whom we judge to be enemies by hating them and trying to destroy
them.

·Give to the needy: We give special treatment to the wealthy
who exploit us and despise the poor who need us, blaming them for their own
poverty and saying that they are lazy.

·When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites: We
insist in saying prayers in public places thinking that somehow that puts God
there.

·Looking at the speck of sawdust in our brother’s eye
and paying no attention to the plank in our own eye: We let
our attention be diverted to moralist splinters in the eyes of others while
ignoring the great issues of violence, global devastation, poverty and
injustice that afflict billions of people around the globe.

·Do not worry about your life: We live
in fear in a failed society and feel that we have to protect ourselves against
real and imagined dangers, seeking safety in material things.

The basic principle of the Kingdom is solidarity. We
either survive together or perish together. Bombing our enemy on the other side
of the world will not make us safer at home. Eventually his fate will be our
fate. The Sermon on the Mount sees this clearly.

Our challenge is to be countercultural and walk in the
opposite direction of what is happening in the world today.